It’s time for a mid-year trend check
What’s REALLY been happening this year?
Good morning.
I hope everyone enjoyed the Fourth of July holiday and long weekend if you were able to take more time off.
Today I’m breaking from the usual structure a bit to do a little lookback on some of the media storylines for the year, which I laid out back in April.
Big picture: most things are the same! But a lot of things have happened that have felt like major shifts in the moment but could take a longer time to actually manifest. It’s a good reminder.
This one is a little long, so no hard feelings if you skip this installment.
Last Scale Standing
As others have covered, lots of brands are losing lots of traffic all over the media landscape. And that looks likely to remain the same as Meta further moves away from driving referrals to publishers and Google continues their AI Overviews foray and zero-click searches seems to be on the rise.
But you’ll hear people, like Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel (who often comes with a lot of hot air that you have to bring when you’re a CEO speaking publicly) who will tell you that the scale game is still possible. As he recently told Brian Morrissey, “Get very high-quality scale, under high-quality brands, [then] deliver real value to advertisers and consumers. These have been the rules of media for a hundred years.”
The big question for me going forward is: What is scale? Like if you have a media property with some kind of paywall that brings 5 million visitors to your website every month but only has 100,000 paid subscribers isn’t that still enough scale to close the gap between paid subscribers and non-paying visitors? If you can get to 1 million subscribers, is that enough to tout to advertisers? Guess it all depends on how much the costs are that you’re carrying and what you’re able to bring back in.
And is scale just site traffic? Or does scale also mean social media following and engagement and the active engagement of the people that follow you on different surfaces?
These aren’t new questions but they feel just as relevant as ever and perhaps even moreso as we continue to move into a new era of what “social media” is.
What Is Social Media Even Good For?
Back in April I wrote: “[S]ocial media no longer drives traffic to websites. Unless maybe you’re in the hard news, culture wars, outrage posting, or celeb and gossip games. I work in food media so none of those things really apply. What’s the point of social media for us now? We’re figuring it out. But if platforms are going to give you tools like IG Broadcasts, we’re going to use them to turn passive followers into active followers. And hopefully that leads to something like a community that might decide paying for a subscription is worth the money because we’re adding something of value to their lives.”
This is still how I feel. I believe on platforms like Instagram that followers are still an overlooked metric. That number isn’t for vanity: it’s an addressable market for people who could be interested in and find value in your product. You just have to show the value each week.
A compelling argument to the contrary was made on a recent episode of the People v. Algorithms podcast where the hosts were asking each other if social media even exists any more. They pointed to the recent re-emergence of people liking the Twitter/X “For You” tab, which has become a kind of “this thing is underrated” card to drop when talking about the current state of media.
But the Twitter/X “For You” tab is just another form of entertainment and not connection. It’s just Twitter’s answer to TikTok. And in the world that TikTok made, followers don’t really matter—all that matters is that you do something weird or entertaining and you blow up for a day or week and leverage that into some kind of creator brand.
So you could still say that followers are worthless. But, for the right brands, I still think they are valuable as a way to build community or gathering places with tools that platforms are going to give you. If they’re not going to provide traffic, then there’s got to be something else to use these tools and surfaces for.
Artificial Intelligence
This is still incredibly boring to me even if I do take the implications of AI on media, the publishing industry, and my livelihood seriously.
The initial Google AI Overviews panic (and ridicule of the product) were both overblown and I’m glad all that coverage has begun to phase out of the news cycle.
The Perplexity story is more interesting as I think who becomes the initial “bad guy” in AI is a big question.
And then all the publishers making deals with OpenAI is another thread to watch. Will these initial deals pay off? Do you take the money and figure it out later?
I’m still inclined to believe Jessica Lessin’s observation in The Atlantic from May (right before The Atlantic struck their deal with OpenAI): ““For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more…It never, ever works as planned.”
Sustainable Media + Community = Future?
Back in April, I pointed to Defector, 404 Media, Puck, Semafor as well as Platformer and The Rebooting as examples of either individual-led or smaller-staffed media companies that may be sustainable in the long run.
That still seems to be the case at the mid-point of the year. Puck has seen some departures lately, but its hard to tell if that’s a sign of anything. Certainly their expansion into sports under John Ourand came at the right time with all of the sports rights and sports media news stories from this year.
On a recent podcast, Ben Smith admitted that Semafor overinvested in video at launch and couldn’t quite figure it out and are walking back that investment. But otherwise Semafor appears to be in good shape.
But I’m more bullish than ever on individual-led media outlets. As you know, I’m a big fan of what Brian Morrissey does at The Rebooting between his newsletters, podcasts, dinner series, and webinars. He has found an essential place as a B2B outlet for the media industry.
What’s opened my eyes the most in recent months is Emily Sundberg’s success on Substack with Feed Me. After all the issues Substack faced at the end of last year with notable figures (like Casey Newton’s Platformer or Today in Tabs or Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting) moving off their platform in protest of their lack of content moderation, it seems like most people hosting their writing on Substack have moved past those issues.
Sundberg in particular is building a daily habit with Feed Me that has led to a vibrant community and even a recent in-person event. When I saw that she could post the simplest of questions in Substack’s chat feature and get over 100 responses I knew there was trouble for bigger media outlets.
And I knew that trouble was serious when she saw even more engagement around a more specific recent prompt.
The kind of community an individual publisher can build through devoted attention and unfettered access is something that larger publishing brands just don’t offer right now. And I think it's what people want more of. We got carried away with talking about “audiences” and not talking about “people” and people want to talk to other people and hear from other people whose thoughts and opinions they care about. Larger publishers have this, but they haven’t figured out the spaces to leverage it in yet.
If anything, more publishers should think about how to work more collaboratively with Substack to leverage their chat feature. It feels old-fashioned, but there was something to the live chats I used to eagerly await on ESPN.com over a decade ago.
The Next Phase of the Streaming Wars
Well, it looks like Paramount might finally be sold or merged with or whatever.
But otherwise it feels like the continued story of the first half of the year was Netflix’s dominance. Their spring was truly strong with the return of Bridgerton, the surprise major success of Baby Reindeer and the surprise minor success of John Mulaney’s live show Everybody’s In LA, as well as the positive receptions of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. The sheer variety of those offerings shows Netflix’s position of strength.
But subscription prices are going to continue to rise. And what will people have the appetite for?
Will that be good for Tubi, which is on a roll? Will YouTube’s usage on connected TVs continue to increase in direct competition with paid streaming services?
Where Is This All Going?
On a recent episode of the People v. Algorithms podcast, Troy Young said the following, which I found very interesting.
“If you have an interface point and you have customer data—particularly anything around consumption and intent—you have a media business without the fundamental expense structure of a media business.
This, to me, is as existential as AI. If you’re a bank you’re a media business; if you’re an airline you’re a media business; if you’re Costco you’re a media business; if you’re Instacart you’re a media business; if you’re Uber you’re a media business…[A]nd anyone trying to sell unremarkable impressions is going to have a really hard time. There has to be deep performative value in what you make, either because you are convening people or bringing together a buyer or seller.
But I think beyond that, we love imperfection, we love humans, we love people that bring love to what they make and that’s what’s really important.”
I think this sums up a more interesting story to watch than AI. The rise of Google and Meta showed that if you could get people to spend time on a place or offered a function that allowed people to find what they were looking for, you could make a lot of money selling space on those surfaces to advertisers.
Now that more and more businesses have apps and users and profiles and order or transaction histories, what keeps them from selling advertising space? What keeps them from using targeted ad delivery systems? There is a growing sector of what’s known as retail media that is thinking about this exactly.
But what matters is the content. I saw this first hand at Artsy. When we wrote articles that we were contractually obligated to fulfill for partner galleries there was little to no traffic. When we began to build a personality and a point-of-view, we were able to create something that people loved.
For so long, larger publishers have been removing their personality in order to chase what works on platforms. And now, smaller organizations or individuals are sending newsletters, writing posts, holding chats, putting on events that show the care they have for the work they are doing and, most importantly, the people on the receiving end of that work.